travel writing, history writing

Indonesia: Notes and Sources

Chapter Notes and Further Reading For A Brief History of Indonesia

There wasn’t enough space to squeeze in the chapter-by-chapter notes and the comprehensive bibliography in the printed book, but if you are interested in the full range of sources used while writing A Brief History of Indonesia: Sultans, Spices, and Tsunamis, and if you’re looking for some recommendations for further reading on Indonesian history, you’ll find them here…

General History Books

Any journey through the archipelago of books about Indonesia’s past has to begin with the big general histories – of which there are several.

An excellent first landfall for any serious reader is the hulking two-volume Cambridge History of Southeast Asia. Totalling some 1,400 pages it’s a daunting behemoth, but it is broken into neat chapters – many of them written in a surprisingly accessible style. It’s particularly good on prehistory and the early centuries of Indianisation, and it has the advantage of tackling what is now Indonesia as part of a wider region.

Of the major Indonesia-specific history books M.C. Ricklefs’ A History of Modern Indonesia since c.1200, now on its fourth edition, is the best known. As the title suggests, this book doesn’t cover prehistory or the Hindu-Buddhist centuries; it takes the arrival of Islam in the Archipelago as its starting point. Nonetheless, it’s packed with detail.

Another well-known book, which does tackle the pre-Islam period, is Jean Gelman Taylor’s Indonesia: Peoples and Histories. This is a very interesting work, and although Gelman Taylor is a professional academic, she has an unusually literary style. She also takes an impeccably modern approach, seeking to highlight the experience of ‘peoples’ across history wherever possible, and bringing lots of little-known lives into focus. This does mean that the framework of historical events is occasionally somewhat obscured, so if you haven’t read much else about Indonesian history you might want to tackle Gelman Taylor’s book alongside something more traditional, for example Colin Brown’s A Short History of Indonesia. This neat little book is written from a scholarly angle, but it’s short and snappy, and it’s particularly good if you want to get an understanding of the economic history of the Archipelago.

An absolutely fantastic – and thoroughly unusual – resource on Indonesian history is Robert Cribb’s Digital Atlas of Indonesian History. Originally published in book form as the Historical Atlas of Indonesia, it is now available as both a CD-ROM and for free online. It takes maps – hundreds of them – as its starting point, often delving into details missed in more traditional publications.

I have used all of the publications mentioned above extensively while researching this book. They – and all the other books and articles I referred to – are listed in the bibliography at the bottom of this page, while details of major sources and recommended further reading relating to individual chapters follow immediately.

Chapters One and Two: Prehistory, Indianisation and Hindu-Buddhist Java

The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia Volume 1 is the place to start reading about prehistory in the Archipelago, where the topic is tackled in a chapter by Peter Bellwood. Bellwood is an authority on this early era, and there’s more detail in his Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago. He has also edited a formidable collection of essays, The Austronesians: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, which covers all things Austronesian from the South Pacific to Madagascar.

As well as these books, I found Paul Michael Munoz’s Early Kingdoms of the Indonesian Archipelago and the Malay Peninsula a handy synthesis of lots of more heavyweight works on the history of the Indianised Archipelago, including those by John Miksic. Miksic is an important writer on the Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms of Java, with lots of scholarly works to his name, but he has also done some books for a more general readership, including the beautifully illustrated Borobudur: Golden Tales of the Buddhas.

It’s always worth remembering just how shady details of the Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms of Java and Sumatra are; some of the standard versions of history in this era are, in fact, merely theories – and not uncontested ones. A pop history like A Brief History of Indonesia: Sultans, Spices, and Tsunamis isn’t really the place to get bogged down in the scholarly debates, so I’ve stuck mainly to the conventional interpretations of the Indianised kingdoms, but it’s worth hunting out scholarly essays by Roy Jordaan for some fresh perspectives on the Sailendras, for example.

The remarkable account of the seventh-century Chinese monk, Yijing, was translated into English by the Japanese scholar Takakusu Junjiro in the late 19th century as A Record of the Buddhist Religion as Practiced in India and the Malay Archipelago. Although the sections dealing with Sumatra are fairly brief, it’s a remarkable book, full of colour and incident, as well as endless details of Buddhist practice and theology. Yijing had some particularly hair-raising encounters with bandits while he was in India.

Chapter Three: Islamisation

The starting point for this chapter is the wonderful Travelsof Ibn Battuta. There have been various translations of this over the centuries, some of them condensed versions of the full text. I used H.A.R. Gibb’s standard abridged version.

M.C. Ricklefs’ History of Modern Indonesia starts with a great overview of the arrival of Islam in the Archipelago. Ricklefs has also done a trilogy of fascinating books charting the history of Islam in Java – Mystic Synthesis in Java, Polarising Javanese Society, and Islamisation and its Opponents in Java. These are absolutely brilliant books, and although they are far more specialised in subject matter than Ricklefs’ better known History, they’re actually much more readable.

I found lots of useful essays on Islamisation – and indeed lots of fascinating material on all aspects of Indonesian history – in the long-running journal Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (‘The Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia’) which has been published by KITLV, the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, since 1853. In the early days the journal was mostly in Dutch, but it is now almost entirely in English. The other significant journal for anyone with an interest in Indonesian history is Indonesia, published by Cornell University in the United States.

The remarkable ‘Suma Oriental’ of the Portuguese apothecary Tomé Pires is available in a translation by Armando Cortesão. Unlike Ibn Battuta’s account, it’s not a personal travelogue, and so not quite so easy a read, but it is packed with remarkable detail nonetheless.

Chapters Four and Five: The spice trade, the VOC and the birth of European empire

For a thoroughly rip-roaring account of the early rivalry between Dutch and English merchants in the Archipelago spice trade, Giles Milton’s Nathaniel’s Nutmeg is brilliant fun. It’s a decidedly Anglocentric account: the Dutch are the bad guys, and the locals hardly get a look in. But it’s a proper page-turner.

For some more scholarly work on the Indies of the VOC, Jean Gelman Taylor’s The Social World of Batavia is full of fascinating details of life in the colonial capital, while for contemporary accounts of Batavia in the late 18th century, Sketches Civil and Military of the Island of Java, edited by John Joseph Stockdale (and available as a modern reprint under the rather less wordy title Island of Java), has the distinction of being the first English-language book about Java. It’s packed with detail – not least about just how filthy and diseased a place the VOC headquarters was.

On the partition of Mataram, the rise of the Yogyakarta sultanate, and the early wrangling between the Dutch and the Javanese, M.C. Ricklefs’ first book, Jogjakarta under Sultan Mangkubumi 1749-1792, is excellent, delivered with the author’s customary humour and sharp scholarly prose.

The other great foreign scholar of Javanese history alongside Ricklefs is Peter Carey. I referred to various of his works, including The British in Java 1811-1816: A Javanese Account, a transcription with voluminous notes of a fascinating account from within the Yogyakarta kraton of the British assault in 1812. Carey’s masterpiece, however – and it really does deserve that accolade – is The Power of Prophecy: Prince Dipanagara and the end of an old order in Java, 1785-1855. It is essentially a scholarly biography of the rebel prince Diponegoro, but weighing in at around a thousand pages there is much more to it than that: it is a full social and political history of Central Java in the late 18th and early 19th century and an insightful account of the dawn of high imperialism in Java. It was my source for the section about Diponegoro, and it is absolutely brilliant.

Chapter Six: The Dutch East Indies in the 19th century

The traditional starting point for reading about the Dutch East Indies in their 19th century heyday is J.S. Furnivall’s Netherlands India: A Study of a Plural Economy, first published in 1944. Furnivall was a former British colonial official in Burma, and he brought to his scholarship a sharp eye for meaningful comparisons between the different European colonies in Asia. The book is obviously very dated, but it’s still essential reading if you want to find out more about this period.

For a much more entertaining account which manages to cram in a hearty dash of social history and a good deal more besides – as well as a mindboggling account of the titular volcano – Simon Winchester’s Krakatoa: The Day the World Explodedis popular history at its best. M.C. Ricklefs’ various books cover what was going on in local societies at the same time.

Alfred Russel Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago is a great read, the epitome of top-flight Victorian travel writing, in which the author combines serious scientific insight with brisk, gazetteer-style accounts of the various places he visited, as well as colourful tales of his own adventures. For some serious insight into some of the places Wallace visited in eastern Indonesia – places often neglected in mainstream histories – see Harvest of the Palm by James Fox. Its subtitle is “Ecological Change in Eastern Indonesia”, but it also delves deep into the general history of Nusa Tenggara.

Wallace was generally admiring of Dutch rule in the Archipelago, but for a fairly horrifying scholarly account life on the plantations of Sumatra, see Jan Breman’s Taming the Coolie Beast.

Chapter Seven: The rise of Indonesian nationalism in the early 20th century

All major histories cover the emergence of resistance to Dutch rule in the early decades of the 20th century, but a particularly interesting account is Adrian Vickers’ A History of Modern Indonesia (not to be confused with M.C. Ricklefs’ similarly titled book). Vickers is a professional historian, but he also has enviable skills as a writer, and he takes an original approach in this book. He tells the tale of Indonesia from the early 20th century to the early 21st century, using the life of the novelist Pramoedya Anata Toer as the central thread. Vickers is also the author of Bali: A Paradise Created, a brilliant account of the construction of the image of a uniquely paradisiacal Bali in the early 20th century.

It’s high time that Sukarno got a new biography for a mainstream readership, but in the meantime the best-known account is J.D. Legge’s Sukarno: A Political Biography. Legge’s book has all the detail you could ask for, but you’ll find rather more colour in C.L.M. Penders’ The Life and Times of Sukarno. Penders is also the editor of Indonesia: Selected Documents on Colonialism and Nationalism, 1830-1942, a rich array of translated documents in which you’ll find Louis Vitalis’ account of the Cultivation System in Priangan, Suwardi Suryaningrat’s caustic satire ‘If I were a Netherlander’, and much else besides.

Chapter Eight: World War II and the Indonesian revolution

A great number of books have tackled events in Indonesia during World War II and its aftermath, though there is no single accessible overview. On the experience of the Dutch who found themselves interred during the Japanese occupation, The Defining Years of the Dutch East Indies, 1942-1949, edited by Jan Krancher, contains personal recollections from many survivors. But if you are seeking a more literary account, there are two remarkable memoirs: Ernest Hillen’s The Way of a Boy is a beautifully written and quietly devastating account of childhood years spent interred in Bandung, and was my source for the opening passage of this chapter. Laurens van der Post’s Night of the New Moon, meanwhile, is a slender account from a British prisoner of war, locked up on the other side of the same city.

Van der Post also wrote an account of his time serving in Java during the year that followed the Japanese surrender, The Admiral’s Baby. A highly readable account of the British involvement in post-war Indonesia, including the Battle of Surabaya, is found in Forgotten Wars by Christopher Bayley and Tim Harper.

Aspects of the Indonesian revolution have been covered in any number of scholarly books, but two titles remain particularly significant, many decades after their publication: George McTurnan Kahin’s Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia and Benedict Anderson’s Java in a Time of Revolution (which also contains useful potted biographies of most significant figures in the period as an appendix).

Chapter Nine: The Sukarno era

Sukarno’s rule is covered in all major histories. A handy overview of covering everything from 1945 until the mid-1990s is Modern Indonesia by Robert Cribb and Colin Brown.

A colourful – if somewhat rose-tinted – account of life in the early years of Indonesian independence can be found in Flowering Lotus, a memoir by the young British teacher, Harold Forster, who worked at the country’s first university in Yogyakarta. This is where I found the first-hand accounts of the 1955 election. It gives a strong impression of the optimism and informality of the era, with the president frequently dropping by at the university to hang out with the students and teachers.

A decade later everything had changed. The ever-contentious events that ultimately brought Sukarno’s rule to an end have been discussed and dissected at length, but there are still no definitive answers. The most accessible account of the events of the ‘30 September Movement’ itself comes from the American journalist John Hughes in The End of Sukarno(originally published as Indonesian Upheaval). Hughes doesn’t do a great deal to question standard Indonesian accounts, but he was on hand at the time, and his version has the freshness of a direct observer.

There’s a radical contrast between the mainstream Indonesian narrative on the events of 1965/66, and the mainstream discourse on the same events from Western scholars – a discourse which began in earnest with Benedict Anderson and Ruth McVey’s A Preliminary Analysis of the October 1, 1965 Coup in Indonesiain 1971. One of the best scholarly accounts is Pretext for Mass Murder by John Roosa. Another more recent publication, which includes some ground-breaking work by Indonesian as well as foreign scholars, is The Contours of Mass Violence in Indonesia, 1965-68, edited by Douglas Kammen and Katherine McGregor. None of these are particularly light reads, but it is a very serious subject.

Chapter Ten: The New Order

There are two big, accessible books dealing with the New Order. Adam Schwartz’s ANation in Waiting was originally published before the fall of Suharto, but the updated third edition covers the end of the regime. If you’re looking for a somewhat lighter account of the same period, which also covers the events of 1998 in more detail, Theodore Friend’s Indonesian Destinies is enlivened by a sporadic first-person narrative. Suharto himself gets a thorough biographical treatment from R.E. Elson in Suharto: A Political Biography.

There are two excellent and highly readable books that throw light on life in Indonesia in the 1990s: Janet Steele’s Wars Within which deals with the New Order’s wrangling with the press, specifically the respected news weekly Tempo; and The Invisible Palace, by the late Jose Manuel Tesoro, a beautifully written, meticulously researched account of the murder of a local journalist in Central Java in 1996 – it is a book that deserves to be much more widely read.

A number of books cover the fall of Suharto, including the aforementioned Indonesian Destinies, and many of the contemporary news reports can still be found online. A highly personal account of the period – including an unusual account of ethnic violence in Kalimantan – is In the Time of Madness by the British journalist Richard Lloyd Parry. This book has drawn a peculiar degree of ire from some Indonesia specialists and long-time foreign residents, but it is very well written and makes for a good, if subjective, account of the fall of Suharto, and of the period surrounding the referendum in East Timor. A similarly subjective account of East Timor’s bloody history, but this time from a journalist with a long and deep commitment to the place, is Irena Christalis’ Bitter Dawn.

On Indonesia in the 21st century a colourful, sprightly introduction is Indonesia, Etc. by Elizabeth Pisani. This highly engaging book is written as a travelogue, but Pisani knows the country very well indeed, and she has many meaningful encounters on her journeys.

Indonesian Fiction

Indonesia has a vibrant literary tradition, but few of its novelists and poets are well-known outside of their home country. This may in part be down to a lack of good translations of Indonesian novels – something which is now changing thanks to the brilliant work of the not-for-profit Lontar Foundation, which puts out English language editions of Indonesian classics, notable amongst with are Salah Asuhan, translated as Never the Twain, by Abdoel Moeis, and Sitti Nurbaya by Marah Roesli.

By far the most famous Indonesian author outside of Indonesia is Pramoedya Anata Toer. An avowedly political writer whose relationship with authority was always strained, he has the curious distinction of having been jailed by the Dutch, the Sukarno government, and the Suharto regime – for well over a decade in the latter case. His best known books are the novels that make up the ‘Buru Quartet’, partly written while he was interred by the New Order on the Buru prison island in Maluku. Based on the life of the journalist Tirto Adhi Soerjo, they take the early 20th century as their backdrop, and the first stirrings of Indonesian nationalism as their theme. They are hugely important works, with a very interesting backstory, but they’re not the lightest of reads. Some of Pramoedya’s other works, particularly The Girl from the Coast (Gadis Pantai in the original), are rather more readable.

Generally more accessible than Pramoedya is the other ‘giant’ of mid-20th-century Indonesian literature, Mochtar Lubis. Twilight in Djakarta is a vivid account of life in Jakarta in the 1960s, but his novella Tiger! is a sharper work.

Of the current generation of Indonesian novelists, several have been translated by the Lontar Foundation, and also by US-based Dalang Publishing. Probably the stand-out work of modern Indonesian literature available to an international audience, however, is Ayu Utami’s Saman. It’s a daring, original short novel by any standards, but it also benefits from a brilliant English translation by Pamela Allen.

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Bibliography

All of the publications that I referred to directly while researching A Brief History of Indonesia are listed below.

Anderson, Benedict. Java in a Time of Revolution. Ithaca, 1974.

Anderson, Benedict and McVey, Ruth. A Preliminary Analysis of the October 1, 1965 Coup in Indonesia. Ithaca, 1971.

Aritonang, Jan Sihar and Steenbrink, Karel A. (eds). A History of Christianity in Indonesia. Leiden, 2008.